5th of November take 2
by Purringpuppy
Summary: on the anniversery of the destruction of parliament, Julian reflects.


Disclaimer: I do not own V

The fifth of November. A day that was so bloody important for two plots on Parliament now. The day that had freed so many minds had destroyed more than one in return. Julian sat in front of the mirror and ran his hair through a year's growth before raising the electric clippers to his head and beginning what had become his own personal commemoration, the only salute that he permitted himself for the man who had saved his live and opened his eyes. This was the third time that his head had been shaved, a year ago to date when his life had ended, and years before when his life had truly begun. The night had been November the fourth, turning to the fifth.. A night which for 19 years had been nothing but another night to survive. The government did two things to people like him, kill them or ignore them until someone else did and until that night he had escaped both fates. As a child he'd lost his mother and when he was 15 his father had disappeared in the night. He hadn't actually disappeared, but no one seemed to care what had really happened when he had been turned out with no place to live and not old enough to find any gainful employment. Slowly the fingermen were finding the few safeplaces left and living outside the system had become near impossible. He should have died that night, lying in an alley, beaten and bloodied as he heard the tower clock chime midnight. Death was hardly the end it seemed, and he woke the next morning in hell. His head had been shaved and he'd been left with only his underwear, not that his clothes had been worth much after last night anyway. It was months he imagined that he was tortured and barely fed while they tried to get him to turn in the people who had harbored him from the government for the past three years. But as bad as hell had been, it had been food, and a roof, which was more than he'd been guaranteed on the street. He didn't know how long it had been when a man had come to him dressed in a bizarre mask and explained to him the test that he had just been given. He didn't know what to think of the man, but he had done something that very few people had ever done for Julian. He had offered him something and asked nothing in return. He could have a roof, and food, and half a dozen things he'd never dreamed of having, all for his use as long as he wanted them. At first that was all it had been. A few passing words had become a friendship they both longed for and Julian began helping the man with the errands he couldn't complete during the night. The man, V, had shown him movies, and books, and ideas that destroyed everything he ever knew and he realized that V's plan must succeed for humanity to have any hope in lasting. The eyes of the world must be opened. He had been there a year when V rescued another such soul, a girl this time. Evey changed V, but he said nothing, just went about the details of the plan which was about to unfold. Julian had stayed away from the girl but now he wished he had spoken up, spent the time he had learning all he could from V. The night Parliament had blown up, he slipped onto the train and removed V's body before the train had blown up. He lay there, scuffed and bruised from the fall off the train and for the first time since meeting V, he cried. He cried not for what he had lost, but for what the world had lost, the ideas that would forever be stuck behind that mask, never to be voiced. Sometime after, he had heard voices coming down the tunnel and he had panicked. He tried to drag V's body, but he suspected that he had broken his arm in the fall. With a kiss to the forehead he had left V and gone back to the Shadow Gallery, back to his room beyond the prison cells and shaved his head once more, for he felt he dead inside as he had the night he had come here to begin with. Now, as he shaved it once again, he imagined inside his head the sounds of explosions and great concertos in the buzz of the clippers and the breeze that swept over his head, swept through his soul. A silent tear rolled down his cheek. It would be the fifth of November all day.


End file.
